Stylos is the blog of Jeff Riddle, a Reformed Baptist Pastor in North Garden, Virginia. The title "Stylos" is the Greek word for pillar. In 1 Timothy 3:15 Paul urges his readers to consider "how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar (stylos) and ground of the truth."

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

I find no fault in this man

Image: The Aztec Great Pyramid of Cholula, Puebla, Mexico

Note: Here are some of my notes from the closing application of last Sunday's sermon titled I find no fault in this man (Luke 23:1-12):

Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find no fault in this man (Luke 23:4).

The phrase that stands
out again in my mind is the ironic declaration from an unlikely mouthpiece, the
cold and ruthless Roman ruler, Pontius Pilate.
What does he say of Jesus? More
than he might ever have understood: “I
find no fault in this man."

Now, most of us don’t
have any problem finding fault. We can
take even the best of men and find some fault with them. But the Scriptures say of Jesus: “I find no fault in this man.”

Think of what your
stance would be if you had to stand before God and given an account of every
thought, word, and deed in your life.
Would anyone say of you: “I find
no fault in this man.”? Consider Psalm
130:3 “If thou, LORD,, shouldest mark
iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
And the intended answer is, NO ONE!
Yet the Psalmist continues: “But
there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared” (Ps. 130:4).

This past week I
started reading a book by Charles Van Doren, a man who worked as an editor for
the Encyclopedia Britannica, titled A
History of Knowledge.

In the very beginning,
he describes the ancient religions that arose and are recorded in early
history. He has one section where he
describes how human sacrifice was an almost universal practice in primitive
religions. In this section he describes
the practice among the ancient Aztecs in Mexico:

Among the Aztec, the toll of sacrifice stuns the
mind. In the last years before the
Spanish conquest, a thousand of the finest children and young people were
offered up each week. Dressed in
splendid robes, they were drugged and then helped up the steps of the high
pyramids and held down upon the altars [I omit the grotesque description which follows]…. A thousand a week, many of them captured in
raids among the neighboring tribes in the Valley of Mexico. A thousand a week of the finest among the
children and youth, who huddled in prisons before their turn came (p. 12).

We know the ancient
Canaanite religions did this as well.
Compare:

Jeremiah 32:35 And they built the high places of
Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto
Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they
should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

Van Doren suggests it
was probably the Israelites of old who were the first ancient civilization to
reject human sacrifice as wrong and as something that God did not require
(citing Genesis 22). Then, this
unbelieving scholar makes an interesting observation. He says, “The Christians never practiced
human sacrifice” because “their religion is based on the one supreme sacrifice”
(p. 15).

Why did the ancient
Aztec practice human sacrifice? I think
it was because they knew of their sin guilt before a holy and righteous God. They tried to respond to that guilt in awful
and detestable ways that God never required.
But despite the sacrifice of thousands of lives, the guilt was never
relieved. Why? There never could. There never was one offered up in whom no
fault could be found.

Contrast this with the Gospel
account of the passion of Christ. It
only took the laying down of the life of the one perfectly righteous and just
man to satisfy the wrath of God and to open a way of peace and reconciliation.